Category Archives: Death Knight

Welcome to the Death Knight Heirlooms Guide for patch 6.2. This post will cover all three of the Death Knight specs, including the optimal enchants. Please keep in mind that heirlooms are designed for leveling, and the choices of which pieces of gear to use as well as which enchants are designed towards leveling rather than raiding. In many cases the choices are the same, but if something seems odd then I’ve likely chosen it for a reason. Feel free to ask if you’re confused or care to offer other comments or suggestions. In the long run, as long as you’re wearing heirlooms with the right primary stats on it, it doesn’t necessarily matter which ones you choose.

Frost (DPS)
For Frost, there are different enchants depending on whether you are going to dual wield or use a two-handed weapon because of how your attacks and passive abilities work. While dual wielding you want to prioritize Mastery, where using a two-handed weapon you’ll want to prioritize Haste. I’ll note that below with [2H] for the two-handed enchant and [DW] for dual wielding.

Like this:

I’d like to tell you that leveling up as a Frost Death Knight is a hard thing to do, but then I would be lying. You see, Frost Death Knights have this thing called a God Complex where they think they can kill whoever they want to without harm or repercussion to themselves, all the loot belongs to them, their DPS is through the roof putting everyone else to shame, and so on. The bad news is, occasionally that will come back to bite you in the butt and score you a trip to the spirit healer. The good news is, that whole God Complex thing started because the majority of it is actually true.

Enough with the intro, let’s take a look at how to go about leveling and playing a Frost Death Knight.

Like this:

In Patch 4.3 the Darkmoon Faire is going to get a nice little revamp (details here). I’ve never been too big on the faire beyond abusing the vendors there to get high selling mats for cheap vendor prices that I could toss on the AH for a quick, easy profit. My lack of interest almost made me ignore the information regarding the faire, but I was bored anyway (and about to leave work for the day) so I figured I might as well take a look.

Most of what the notes mentioned weren’t bad, but nothing that would get me otherwise interested in the DMF, until I stumbled onto this:

“We have adorable companion pets inludin’ a fez-wearing monkey, a plethora of profession recipes, toys, balloons, souvenirs, delectable carnival snacks and beverages, heirlooms for the little ones, and even replicas of long-lost suits of armor that we’re offering for your Transmogrification needs.”

Unfortunately for us, there’s no more mention of heirlooms in the article, so we don’t know for sure what it refers to. It could be new heirlooms, it could be existing heirlooms, or it could be other items all together that they simply used the word to describe. Without the details, one can only hope and imagine.

NOTE: This guide is currently in the process of being upgraded for Patch 6.1. I’m going to save the updates I make as I make them, so be aware that at this time there are portions of this guide that have been updated and other portions that have not. Once all updates have been made I will remove this notification.

You can take a look at this Wowhead Link for a full list of heirloom gear.

With my interest in WoW renewed, thanks almost entirely to people asking me to update this guide and me in turn looking into the game again, it’s time to get this puppy updated with the most recent changes to heirlooms in Warlords of Draenor.

The table below provides links for you to jump straight to your class and spec to find out which heirlooms you should be using in order to optimize your performance. Once you go to the section for your class and spec you will find a table that lists all of the heirloom items for each slot, at the bottom of that table you will find another link to see which enchants you should use on those heirlooms while you level.

After a few conversations back and forth on Twitter, it was decided that I should be the one to do a post about tips for farming the Critter Killer Squad achievement for your guild by killing 50,000 critters collectively. Completing this achievement gives your guild members access to the Armadillo Pup companion pet, though you do have one heck of a rep grind to do with your guild before you can actually purchase and summon him. The current PTR patch mentions he’s purchasable at Revered once the patch goes live, but currently it’s Exalted.

This isn’t really a guide to show you how to do it, it’s merely a list of tips to help you along the way. I’m going to point out the primary locations for where I did most of my grinding as well as things you can do to help you out in your own.

General Tips

Classy Killers
The first thing to consider if you’re going to go on a critter farming spree is your class. If you don’t have good AoE spells, or you’re not able to “spam” your AoE spells, then you aren’t really an ideal farmer. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it of course, only that you could do better if you were a different class. Which class is the best Critter farmer in the game? Mages followed by Priests.

Mages are the best critter farmers because they have a cheap AoE spell that you can spam (no cooldown) and several ways of getting their mana back quickly and easily. By taking the Arcane spec they can reduce the cooldown of their best mana return, Evocation, to every two minutes. By taking the Fire spec they gain access to two more AoE spells that can be cast instantly on a targeted location. And they can always conjure their own food for free if mana returns get stuck on cooldown.

Priests have a similarly useful AoE, but mana can become an issue after sustained periods without as many ways of generating it back.

You can also do a fair job with a Death Knight if you take the Frost Spec, allowing you to cast two Blood Boils, and two Howling Blasts to clear large numbers of critters. The drawback is that Howling Blast does require you to select a target which can be hard if you’re having to click on some of these tiny critters. You can get around that either with a macro or by trying to click on other, larger targets to center it on. You can also use your “ice cubes” cooldown when it’s up, allowing Frost Fever to kill them.

Critter Killer “SQUAD”
The next thing to consider is whether or not other people in your guild are willing to help you. Why is that important? Because just like loot in dungeons or raids, you get credit for the kills as long as you’re in the area when they die. Credit in the case of critters is the kill count. What that means is that if you’re in a group then everyone who is there and within “reward range” of the critters when they die all get credit for it.

So if you’re in a group with another person for your guild then every critter killed counts as two critters because both of you are rewarded with a kill. If you’re in a group of five, then every critter counts as five. And if you’re in a 40 man raid, then every critter counts as 40 instead.

Remember, guild achievements aren’t meant to be accomplished by a single individual, they’re meant to be a group effort; that’s why they’re guild achievements. Get a group together for the areas you want to farm in and then go do them together. You can either send a large group, like the 40 man raid, to a single location, or you can do smaller parties or raids to several locations at once.

Uldum
Uldum: the land of sheep, moths, lizards and scarabs.

This is where most of the people who got this achievement first did their thing. There are two locations on the map where two groups of sheep spawn which make it an excellent zone to grab a few, quick kills from. When the expansion was first released killing these sheep forced more sheep to instantly respawn, making it the single-best location in the game to farm the achievement. Once Blizzard caught on though, they took away the respawn rate and now they respawn about the same as any other critter, though maybe a tad slower.

Those little packs of sheep are still a great source of kills though, so I still enjoyed farming them even after the respawn nerf.

Anywhere that you find green growth in the zone can also be home to moths which count for the achievement as well. If you happen to be an herbalist or a skinner then you’ll likely be farming these areas for your professions as well, and killing critters while you’re in the middle of farming something else anyway is a great way to contribute to the guild without going out of your way. The sheep don’t quite have enough time to respawn after a single path along the highest spawn points of Whiptail unless you manage to find several of the nodes and stop for moths along the way, but a double-path should have the big sheep packs back up for you.

If you’re a miner then you’ll often find along your mining paths here that there will be several groups of critters that spawn in groups of three and then spread out and “flee” when you get close to them. Drop down in the middle and fire off an AoE spell to grab your three kills and then return to your ore farming. Many of the ore nodes themselves are spawn points for these critters which you can use to some extent as a reference for a place to keep your eyes open for a node you’re not aware of.

I start my mining path just south of where the sheep spawn, at a point where I often find Pyrite nodes and then I run a path that takes me through both sheep spawn locations, up around where the Armadillo rare spawn is located, up into the western mountain ranges looping around the north side of the map all the way to the east where I also find several Pyrite nodes, and then I go back to the sheep spot. My mining path is significantly larger than my herb path, and the sheep have always respawned by the time I get back around.

You can also make a macro to “/target Strange Camel Statue” to search for the statue that gives you a chance at a camel mount. I haven’t had any luck with that one myself yet, but I’ve been told that’s the best way to find it since the statue can be targeted.

Zul’Gurub
Zul’Gurub: The raid that once was, land of the eternal snakes.

In Zul’Gurub you’re going to be killing snakes. Lots, and lots, and lots of snakes. Now, there aren’t all that many snakes that are actually there, probably only 25-30 in this particular area, but killing them forces more to spawn and they also have a fast respawn rate on their own. The key to getting them to spawn a lot is to make sure that you kill all of them, and doing that requires you to know where all of them are.

Go to the area marked on the map. You’ll find the section where the snake boss used to be located when ZG was still a raid instance. Now, back out of his room onto the main pathway that runs around the instance. There are 4 snakes that spawn right outside there; 2 are in line with the doorway and there is one slightly to both the left and right of the door. The doorway itself also has up to 3 snakes that can spawn inside it.

Now your objective is clear a ring around the entire area inside the snake bosses “room”. So go in the door and start making a circle around the edge, spamming your AoE the whole time. I prefer to turn right and go around counter-clockwise, but that’s just me. When you come around opposite the doorway to where the stairs are go on up and do the same thing there, spamming your AoE as you circle around the upper floor. Then go back down the stairs and finish your ring of the lower level by following it around and going back out the door.

From there it’s just a simple matter of repeating everything you just did. If you don’t kill all of the snakes then not all of them will respawn, that’s why I have you kill the ones outside the door. You can’t kill just the lower floor and outside the door, or the snakes will follow normal respawn rules. If you do take the time to get snake down in there then you’ll have a constant supply of snakes to kill.

As you path around here you’ll pick up on where all of the snakes are and get a feel for where you need to stand when you fire your AoE to kill the most snakes per cast, and you’ll find just how close you need to get to the edges of the room. Once you’ve got a feel for it you’ll be able to clear the place in no time and can probably develop a rhythm like I did where I didn’t even have to look at the screen anymore because I knew how far to turn in each direction in sequence to get to where I was going.

ZG farming gets old pretty fast, but it is effective and it’s your best source if you don’t want to deal with respawn rates. If you’re grinding the achievement with your guild you probably don’t want to bring more than 2-3 other people with you to this place. While killing does force respawns, there’s still a little bit of an actual respawn on the forced spawn as well which ends up giving you a slight delay followed by bursts of snakes in random places and it gets a little screwy.

Eastern Plaguelands is overall the best place for you to farm. It has more critters than any other location in the game now, and they all have a reasonable respawn rate of 3-5 minutes. The respawn timer kind of sucks, but the cave is large enough and there are enough critters in there to make up for it.

EPL comes with another side benefit though which helps with that respawn timer, and that’s farming for the Mr. Grubbs companion pet. The whole point of killing these critters is to open up another pet, so don’t try to tell me you’re not in it for pets. ;)

If you don’t already have Mr. Grubbs then go ahead and clear out the cave full of critters and then fly east and farm some mobs for a chance to get Mr. Grubbs. After a few minutes of grinding those, head back to the cave and kill some more, then grind Grubbs while you wait, and so on and so forth.

If you’re going to grind this achievement with your guild then this is the best place to do it in groups.

Psynister’s Psystem
I did a large portion of my guild’s critter farming solo, mostly because I had no idea at the time that doing it in groups could multiply your kill count. If I had known that then we would have gotten it way sooner than we did.

I started off farming the sheep in Uldum, pre-nerf, and not expecting a nerf to come for a while I mostly took my time with them and only did a few thousand at a time before going off to do something else. I don’t remember what our count was when the nerf hit, but I think it was around 10-12k at that point.

The nerf wasn’t a big setback though because I had found a location that was even better. I was leveling a Worgen Fury Warrior to become PvP twink when I suddenly found myself in a tunnel/hallway absolutely full of critters. I remembered it from the Beta but I had completely forgotten that the area existed. The great thing about this place was that the critters actually attacked you which mean that my Warrior had a never ending supply of Rage along with a never ending supply of critters, and a wonderful spell to dump that Rage into that just happened to be an AoE.

I farmed the crap out of that hall until all of my non-BoA gear was broken. Once it broke I set off to find myself a repair vendor so I could make use of my enchanted Hand-Me-Downs again, but none of them existed in the phase I was in. Sadly, neither did a mailbox so I couldn’t send the BoA’s to a new Warrior. The grinding was still great, but slower after all of my gear was busted so I took a break there for a while as well. The following week this place was nerfed as well so that the critters don’t count. Still, I’d managed over 20,000 kills there.

That left me with only a few options so I searched for other good places to go and stumbled onto the snakes in ZG. The good thing about them is that they do have an excellent respawn rate. The bad thing is, farming them kind of sucks with how spread out they are so you don’t get as many kills in as short of a time. And because of the layout I actually got bored with it easier than I did the others. I only did maybe 500-1,000 there before I got bored and left.

I then went to try my luck in EPL which is where I decided to spend most of my remaining time farming it. The respawn rate isn’t great, but the number of critters inside was fantastic. The respawn timer did make it boring pretty easily though, so again I only ended up with a little over 1,000 kills here at the time.

From there I left the achievement alone for a while at around 36,000 critters. From there I left it up to the rest of the guild for a while and we made decent progress from there. When I saw that we were within 5,000 of the achievement I went back to farming a bit more seriously and decided to beat the respawn timers by setting up a different toon in each of my three best farming locations and just relog each time I finished off an area. That worked for all of two cycles before I was killing them all too fast to really make it efficient. The DK in Uldum was doing good slaying sheep with Blood Boil and Howling Blast, but the Balance Druid kind of sucked in ZG with how much they were spread out and how much mana my non-cooldown AoE spells required to cast. The Mage was still slaying like crazy in EPL though, and eventually I just gave up on the rotation and stuck with Mage/EPL.

Quite a few members jumped in there at the end trying to finish off the achievement. At the very end, I saw two other people farming critters and only one of which was in a good spot (Uldum) for getting big numbers in a short amount of time. I’d worked so hard on the achievement though that I wasn’t about to let someone else finish what I’d started so I jumped back on the Mage for one final push through that EPL tunnel. I went in with 200 critters left on the countdown and started in.

I saw the numbers drop quickly, and just as we hit 13 I saw someone else in my tunnel doing the same thing. If he had been flagged, and on the opposite faction, I’d have killed him with AoE spells a’blazing, but that was not the case. Luckily I’d been through that stinking cave so many times that I knew all of the twists and turns and I knew there was a side passage to his right…and apparently so did he.

Now all I have to do is stop being such a friggin altoholic and focus on a single character long enough to get my rep high enough to buy the Armadillo. I’m not real big on companion pets, but still – I am a Texan, after all.

Today we’re going to look at which heirlooms you should purchase for your leveling alts. A couple of weeks ago I covered Enchanting Your Heirlooms, so I’ll refer you back to that post if you have already purchased heirlooms and would like to look into the various ways that you can enhance their performance via enchants and item enhancements.

Equipment Lists
I’m going to make a list of heirlooms for each class individually, and I will mention certain items that would work better for certain specs as well. I will tell you right now though, that while I have leveled most classes to a significant leveling milestone, I have not played every class and every spec. So if you see me suggest an item for your class because I know you’re looking for Spell Power, but you feel it would be better for you to go with another because it has Spirit as well as Spell Power, then go with your gut as you may very well know that particular class better than I do.

What I am going to have is a list of weapons, chests, and shoulders for you to use in each of your different specs, and a (hopefully) short explanation of why. In some cases there may be multiple suggestions made for a particular slot, particularly when it comes to weapons. The reason for this will generally be because there are multiple builds that people use for that class, or because certain equipment options aren’t available until a higher level. A good example of this is the Enhancement Shaman who benefits more from a large two-hand weapon until level 40 when they can dual wield one-handers, or the Warrior who may dual wield one-handers until level 60 and then dual wield two-handers from there on.

Under each class header you’ll find the list of gear that I suggest and prefer. There will also be a Substitutions list which are items that I consider to be reasonable replacements for the items I suggest in case you already have some of those and would rather not purchase others, or in case you have more of one currency than another and can’t afford all of the recommended pieces.Turn the page to find out more…

A subject that I get endless laughter out of on Twitter or in Vent is the deletion of level 80 toons. I’ve deleted two level 80 characters so far, and I have no doubt that there will be others in my future as well. Deleting characters has never bothered me because, as I’ve stated several times before, I play to level. Once a character hits the level cap the game doesn’t “start” for me, it ends. I don’t care about gearing them up, doing dailies for gold, building my rep, collecting mounts and tabards, or anything else that people do at level 80.

One way you can look at it is that the Experience bar on my toons is a representation of my personal Enjoyment bar. The more it moves, the more fun I have. Once I ding and that bar resets I’ve got a whole new bar full of fun to go play around with. But once that bar stops moving, so too does my enjoyment with that character. Now, I do have an exception to that which is raiding with my guild, but I only do that on one of my toons. Right now that one toon happens to be my Mage, but he may very well get replaced with a healer before too long.

So now that you’ve got the backstory that nobody asked for let’s get down to business; shall we?

Deleting max leveled toons is something that makes most players cringe. They just can’t stand the thought of throwing away all that time and effort that it took. For me of course, it’s just another day and another toon.

Steps For Deletion
When you delete a high level toon for the sake of deleting them rather than for something like closing your account and rage quitting or whatever.

Check the Auction House: A lot of players do all of their AH business on a single toon, which is my preferred method. If that’s the case with you then you can skip this step unless (obviously) this is the toon that you do it on. The first thing you want to check is whether or not you have any gold coming in from sells. If so then you know you need to wait to delete until after you get the gold for those items. If a bid was placed then you’ll need to wait for one hour after the auction time, where a buy out will come in approximately one hour after it was purchased. For all other items you have on there you want to just cancel the auctions so that you can get the items back and then send them to another toon to sell or just vendor them.

Clear Out Your Bank: First thing’s first, you need to send all your valuable goods to another toon, preferably your bank alt or your main character, or something along those lines. If you send items in the mail then you can immediately delete the toon and still get the items in the mail, but if you put something on the AH with them then you lose any items or gold from selling them. If there are Soulbound items in there then you should vendor them all or delete them if they cannot be sold.

Everything else should be sent to another character. If you have crafting mats for that toon then you may want to take one last run through your profession to make whatever might be more profitable crafted than as raw mats. If you have any items in your bags or bank that are for quests that you can’t immediately turn in, then delete them.

Spending Currency: The first thing you want to do is take advantage of all your currency. That means raid/heroic emblems, stonekeeper shards, honor points, etc – basically everything except for your gold. Spend it either on things that you can sell or things that can benefit your other characters. In my case I spent my emblems of Frost/Triumph on Crusader Orbs that I sent to my bank alt to sell on the AH. My Stonekeeper’s Shards and Wintergrasp Marks were turned into Wintergrasp Commendations which bind to your account and grant 2,000 Honor when used.

I used the honor tokens to bump Psynister’s honor to get close to a multiple of 10,000 and then ran one quick battleground for enough honor kills to get the last 250’some honor to bump me over the 10k mark (50k in his case) rather than spend one of the commendations for 2k and then not use 1,750 of it. The honor points were then used to purchase epic gems from the vendor in Stormwind which I sent as raw gems rather than cutting them myself before I deleted him.

Also, since Psynister was a 450 Jewelcrafter I did his daily JC quest and turned the token in for a Dragon’s Eye that I also sent to have auctioned since the gems you cut from it all bind on pickup. The final currency he had available to him was the gold itself which I did not spend since it can be spent by any toon.

Selling Your Gear: Deleting a character with all their gear on is like throwing away gold, so be sure to find yourself a vendor and sell everything you’re wearing that’s not transferable to another toon (such as BoA Heirlooms). The whole point here is to not waste resources. You might be deleting the character and thus “wasting” the time and effort put into the character, but for me I got paid back for that with entertainment and the rest is just icing.

Mail Your Spoils: Finally you need to send everything you’ve got left to another character. I personally use my main character as my AH character and have my bank alt simply hold things for me so that I’m not bothered with logging into them all the time. Send everything that you kept from your bank/bags and everything that you got from cancelling auctions and so on, but don’t send your gold just yet.

Sell Your Bags: We’re here to milk it for everything it’s worth so be sure to sell your bags after you’ve gotten rid of all of your other items. If your bags aren’t soulbound then you can send them in the mail as well, otherwise you’ll need to just vendor them.

Send Your Gold: And finally you need to send all of the gold that you have to your other character as well.

Walkthrough
Now that all of your resources have been spent and all your goods have been sent off to other characters to hold or dispose of, it’s time to get down to business and delete the toon. All it takes is a quick log out, click the delete button, type in the word “delete” to confirm, and then click on “Ok”. It’s as simple as that.

To give you a better idea of how it’s done I went ahead and put it into a video for you. I realize that the audio in the video is insanely low compared to what it was when I uploaded it, so something apparently went a little off during the upload or something. I might fix it, might not. Anyway, my apologies for the crappy sound.